God bless our troops- thank u for our freedoms.... we realize in Afghanistan- words/paper don't influence pure evil - and in all these years....
our beloved Afghans have NOT given up ...not once... except for screaming to the women of the world... 'where are u... why aren't u helping us???
and our NATO TROOPS SCREAMING... how can u call your sons and daughters of Nato flags to war- whilst u give medical help to the evil baby killing machine ...so they can come back and kill and destroy innocents and your troops... YET AGAIN?
--------------
BLOGSPOT:
Canada Military News-Military Suicides- Canada troop suicides over 158/USA soldier suicides over 22 a day/Australia soldier suicides over 200/UK soldiers suicides over 500/Send Up The Count-PTSD/SUICIDE- Help Lines/Videos/Blogs/links /Canada suicide help lines/Nato stories of despair and no help /November 1, 2015
--------
How can we fight climate change when we can't even stop
global war/
The Geneva Conventions 150 years later … still relevant?
23 October 2014
·
State
representatives from 16 African countries gathered in Pretoria in September to
reflect on the development of the law of war and the continued relevance of the
Geneva Conventions.
·
The discussions took place at the 14th Annual Southern Africa Regional Seminar
on International Humanitarian Law (IHL), an annual event co-hosted by the
Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO) of the government
of South Africa and the ICRC. This year it brought together government
representatives from Angola, Botswana, Comoros, Democratic Republic of the
Congo, Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia,
Seychelles, Swaziland, South Africa Zambia and Zimbabwe to review the current
status of ratification and implementation of IHL in their countries.
The central theme of the seminar focused on ‘150 years since the Geneva Conventions’ and participants were addressed by government experts, members of the ICRC, local think tanks, academics and a judge of the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights. The gathering examined the implementation record of the Geneva Conventions in Southern Africa, in particular African solutions to the repression of war crimes and the continued relevance of the Geneva Conventions in light of new technologies in warfare.
The central theme of the seminar focused on ‘150 years since the Geneva Conventions’ and participants were addressed by government experts, members of the ICRC, local think tanks, academics and a judge of the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights. The gathering examined the implementation record of the Geneva Conventions in Southern Africa, in particular African solutions to the repression of war crimes and the continued relevance of the Geneva Conventions in light of new technologies in warfare.
· Status of implementation of the Geneva Conventions in Africa
·
Implementation of the Geneva Conventions refers to all the steps taken to
realize the full respect of the rules contained in the instruments. Such steps
range from law-making, through domestication of the instruments, to policy
making. An audit of the status of implementation of the Geneva Conventions in
Africa revealed that while all African states have ratified the Geneva
Conventions, and the majority have ratified the Additional Protocols I and II,
many have yet to ratify Additional Protocol III, which recognizes the Red
Crystal as an additional emblem of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement.
It was further noted that although many African countries have national legislation domesticating the Geneva Conventions, much of this legislation only domesticates the Conventions themselves and not their Additional Protocols. The ICRC encouraged states to revisit their implementation status of the Geneva Conventions, while many of the participants identified the ratification of Additional Protocol III as a priority for their country.
It was further noted that although many African countries have national legislation domesticating the Geneva Conventions, much of this legislation only domesticates the Conventions themselves and not their Additional Protocols. The ICRC encouraged states to revisit their implementation status of the Geneva Conventions, while many of the participants identified the ratification of Additional Protocol III as a priority for their country.
· Continued relevance of the Geneva Conventions
·
The conflict landscape has changed significantly since 1864. In his opening
address, Mr Pitso Montwedi, Chief Director, Human Rights and Humanitarian
Affairs Directorate, DIRCO, reflected on this evolution of the battlefield:
“Today’s wars have little in common with the battles of the 19th century. The
fighting has gradually moved from clearly defined battlefields to populated
areas. Traditional war between armies of opposing states is the exception,
while non-international conflicts have become a norm. Nowadays, civilians are
increasingly bearing the brunt of armed conflicts.”
Jürg Eglin, head of the ICRC’s Pretoria regional delegation, asked the participants whether the Geneva Conventions were still relevant today, and noted: “The answer is a clear yes. It is a matter of development and implementation of this body of law, and there we can make a difference.”
The seminar sought to unpack these changes and participants debated the impact of new technologies in warfare as well as the humanitarian consequences of certain weapons. For example, on the impact of drone technology and cyber warfare, Umesh Kadam, ICRC regional legal advisor, noted that in terms of article 36 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, all new weapons must comply with the basic principles of IHL, in respect of their development and use. Participants thus recognized that in spite of the changing landscape of warfare, developments do not occur in a legal vacuum, and the basic principles contained in the Geneva Conventions remain applicable. Participants concluded that given the evolution of warfare, political authorities must continue to be reminded of the relevance of IHL and the Geneva Conventions.
The humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons, the call for nuclear disarmament and the relevance of these issues to Africa were points of discussion. Participants agreed that African countries should not be left on the side-lines of the debate as Africa is the largest nuclear weapon-free zone in the world. Yet while no African countries are currently developing nuclear weapons, Africa is in the supply chain of the materials needed to manufacture such weapons. The likelihood of a nuclear detonation in Africa may be relatively low, yet no state would be immune to the humanitarian consequences in the event of a nuclear detonation. The value of the African Union developing a common position was discussed, with the emphasis on the relevance of the issue to Africa and calling for disarmament of current nuclear stockpiles.
Jürg Eglin, head of the ICRC’s Pretoria regional delegation, asked the participants whether the Geneva Conventions were still relevant today, and noted: “The answer is a clear yes. It is a matter of development and implementation of this body of law, and there we can make a difference.”
The seminar sought to unpack these changes and participants debated the impact of new technologies in warfare as well as the humanitarian consequences of certain weapons. For example, on the impact of drone technology and cyber warfare, Umesh Kadam, ICRC regional legal advisor, noted that in terms of article 36 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, all new weapons must comply with the basic principles of IHL, in respect of their development and use. Participants thus recognized that in spite of the changing landscape of warfare, developments do not occur in a legal vacuum, and the basic principles contained in the Geneva Conventions remain applicable. Participants concluded that given the evolution of warfare, political authorities must continue to be reminded of the relevance of IHL and the Geneva Conventions.
The humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons, the call for nuclear disarmament and the relevance of these issues to Africa were points of discussion. Participants agreed that African countries should not be left on the side-lines of the debate as Africa is the largest nuclear weapon-free zone in the world. Yet while no African countries are currently developing nuclear weapons, Africa is in the supply chain of the materials needed to manufacture such weapons. The likelihood of a nuclear detonation in Africa may be relatively low, yet no state would be immune to the humanitarian consequences in the event of a nuclear detonation. The value of the African Union developing a common position was discussed, with the emphasis on the relevance of the issue to Africa and calling for disarmament of current nuclear stockpiles.
· Sexual violence as a challenge to IHL
·
Sexual violence stands out among numerous challenges to the scope and
application of IHL in contemporary conflicts. Although international law
prohibits sexual violence, incidents of sexual violence during armed conflict
continue to take place. Sexual violence encompasses a number of sexual acts
which involve force, threat of force or coercion. While many countries already
criminalize rape, few have legislation which criminalizes other acts of sexual
violence.
Sexual violence in armed conflict is a crime like no other because it can have devastating consequences on the victim, the victim’s family, as well as the entire community. Such far-reaching effects make it challenging for a state to respond to the needs of victims, whether emergency medical care or psychological and legal support. As such, the meeting noted the importance of establishing, in peace time, procedures to address these concerns should an armed conflict break out. Such procedures include criminalising all forms of sexual violence and establishing victim support structures such as counselling centres or support associations. In the interest of preventing sexual violence, participating states were encouraged to adopt mechanisms to safeguard the interests of vulnerable communities and to counter risks of exposure to sexual violence.
Sexual violence in armed conflict is a crime like no other because it can have devastating consequences on the victim, the victim’s family, as well as the entire community. Such far-reaching effects make it challenging for a state to respond to the needs of victims, whether emergency medical care or psychological and legal support. As such, the meeting noted the importance of establishing, in peace time, procedures to address these concerns should an armed conflict break out. Such procedures include criminalising all forms of sexual violence and establishing victim support structures such as counselling centres or support associations. In the interest of preventing sexual violence, participating states were encouraged to adopt mechanisms to safeguard the interests of vulnerable communities and to counter risks of exposure to sexual violence.
· Outcomes
·
Armed conflict is not unfamiliar to many countries in Southern Africa.
However, given the passage of time since the wars of national liberation, many
regional participants who work on IHL matters do so amidst competing interests.
The seminar served to bring seemingly distant issues ‘closer to home’,
participants agreeing on measures to enhance the implementation of IHL in their
region. These included structured peer-to-peer engagement between national IHL
committees and the need to bring IHL issues before state parliaments and
multi-lateral bodies.
Participants also highlighted the relevance of national IHL committees engaging with regional bodies, particularly including the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Secretariat and the African Union Commission.
With regard to the question posed at the outset – whether the Geneva Conventions were still relevant today – this was met with a resounding yes. As Pitso Montwedi observed: “Modern warfare brings with it various challenges, but war can be beaten. And prevention is one of the effective ways to go about this.”
Participants also highlighted the relevance of national IHL committees engaging with regional bodies, particularly including the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Secretariat and the African Union Commission.
With regard to the question posed at the outset – whether the Geneva Conventions were still relevant today – this was met with a resounding yes. As Pitso Montwedi observed: “Modern warfare brings with it various challenges, but war can be beaten. And prevention is one of the effective ways to go about this.”
---------------
BLOGSPOT:
CANADA MILITARY NEWS: F**king
taliban-WTF??- u were in that hospital waving ur f**king flag- millions and millions
of citizens globally are sick and tired of the 2FACED GENEVA CONVENTION that
the monsters wipe their asses on ur written meaningless words and destroys
innocents whilst u protecting the monsters.... we must look at globaly people
$$$$$$ donations to doctors without borders and red cross- ENOUGH!!! -our
troops and innocents matter.... God bless our Canada and our beloved Afghan
people /BLOGS n links
-------------
COMMENT:
the International
Red Cross is doing what they are supposed to be doing, WITHOUT TAKING SIDES on
this issue.
"One country's terrorist is another country's freedom fighter."
"One country's terrorist is another country's freedom fighter."
The International Committee of the Red Cross has drawn
fire for providing medical training and basic medical supplies to the Taliban
in Afghanistan.
Talk about
supplying comfort to the enemy. The International Committee of the Red Cross
has drawn fire for providing medical training and basic medical supplies to the
Taliban in Afghanistan.
The 150-year old Geneva-based organization said its efforts in April to reach out to “over 100 Afghan security personnel, over 70 members of the armed opposition, taxi drivers involved in the transport of wounded people, first-aiders and its own staff” were in keeping with the Red Cross’ neutrality mandate to not discriminate between the different sides in a conflict.
Among the three-day courses the ICRC is offering up are lessons in international humanitarian law, practical advice on bandaging wounds and basic medical techniques, aimed at reminding all sides about respecting civilians and the proper treatment of detainees.
The efforts have raised eyebrows from the international media and among Afghan officials, who question the distinction between offering medical care and training insurgent fighters to provide it. In response, the ICRC said it has done similar outreach in other war-torn areas such as Darfur, Sudan and in Gaza to Hamas members and that it has been doing so in Afghanistan with the Taliban, Afghan police and civilians first-responders for four years.
Do you think the Red Cross should be providing this aid to the Taliban.
The 150-year old Geneva-based organization said its efforts in April to reach out to “over 100 Afghan security personnel, over 70 members of the armed opposition, taxi drivers involved in the transport of wounded people, first-aiders and its own staff” were in keeping with the Red Cross’ neutrality mandate to not discriminate between the different sides in a conflict.
Among the three-day courses the ICRC is offering up are lessons in international humanitarian law, practical advice on bandaging wounds and basic medical techniques, aimed at reminding all sides about respecting civilians and the proper treatment of detainees.
The efforts have raised eyebrows from the international media and among Afghan officials, who question the distinction between offering medical care and training insurgent fighters to provide it. In response, the ICRC said it has done similar outreach in other war-torn areas such as Darfur, Sudan and in Gaza to Hamas members and that it has been doing so in Afghanistan with the Taliban, Afghan police and civilians first-responders for four years.
Do you think the Red Cross should be providing this aid to the Taliban.
---------------
BLOGSPOT:
CANADA MILITARY NEWS-
RWANDA-Canadians Remember Rwanda- April 7, 2014/So few...NO heroes among Global
politicans r Global $$$ Media- so many deaths... not a white mans war-UN
ignored- as did Africas- RWANDA SCREAMS THAT SYRIA IS 2014's RWANDA- shame United
Nations- Shame!
--------------
Our troops and yours and citizens are
asking NATO/UNITED NATIONS/OUR NATIONS in Afghanistan: “What are we doing here
helping their fighters, who we are bombing, 2b treated so they can fight
again?”- and shouldn’t intelligent media reporting tell both sides of the
story, instead of just following the cave dwellers...like proven in RWANDA?
Isn’t it about time 4 – just the facts in the news-NOT ur view sir/ ma’am ?-
God bless our troops and yours.... thank u
-------------
BLOGSPOT:
CANADA MILITARY NEWS: War Hero George S. McGovern opposed the Vietnam War- Castro Fixation and decried America's capacity for Nuclear 'overkill'-I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars 4 young men 2 die in..../musings.... God bless our troops and yours /Hotel California/Honour our history- First Nations and Immigration movement- it's what built our nation of today eh... /PARAPAN AM GAMES 2015- Toronto...reflecting back 1976 Torontolympiad 38 nations... proving disabilities are abilities in disguise -all politics removed folks /Canada's sorry federal political choices.... same ole same ole O Canada
-------------
UN and Red Cross rebuke world leaders
UN and Red Cross scold world leaders over ‘conflict paralysis’- 31 October 2015
- From the section Europe
The heads of the UN and Red Cross have issued a rare joint rebuke to world leaders, accusing them of “disturbing paralysis” in the face of conflict.
“This flouts the very raison d’etre of the UN,” its chief, Ban Ki-moon, said.
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) President Peter Maurer said the world had rarely witnessed so much suffering and instability.
They urged immediate concrete steps to ease the plight of civilians in places like Afghanistan, Nigeria and Syria.
It is the first time the two bodies have issued a joint warning, says the BBC’s Imogen Foulkes in Geneva, in a sign of desperation over the spread of conflicts across the world.
‘Defying basic humanity’
“Rarely before have we witnessed so many people on the move,” Mr Maurer told reporters at a joint news conference with Mr Ban in Geneva on Saturday.
He said some 60 million people globally had been displaced from their homes because of conflict and violence – “the highest figure since World War Two”.
Image copyright AFP Image caption Recent months have seen a sudden spike in the numbers of people seeking refuge in Europe
In a statement, the two leaders said today’s wars were being waged “in complete defiance of basic humanity”.
Mr Maurer said this applied to combatants in the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, South Sudan and Yemen.
“Civilians are being killed, tortured and starved, hospitals bombed, no-one is being to held account, no one is even trying to stop the slaughter,” he added.
Mr Ban said: “Enough is enough. Even war has rules. It is time to enforce them.”
They called on states to do the following to help bring about peace:
- reign in armed groups and hold them accountable for abuses, and stop the use of heavy weapons in populated areas
- protect and assist displaced people fleeing insecurity, and help to find long-term solutions
- ensure unhindered access to medical and humanitarian missions
- condemn those who violate international humanitarian law
- redouble efforts to find sustainable solutions to conflicts
The UN estimates that more than 700,000 people have crossed to Europe by boat so far this year – many of them refugees from war-torn Syria. The approach of winter has so far done little to slow the flow.
This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service – if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.
Source: UN and Red Cross rebuke world leaders
--------------
AND THERE IT IS FOLKS FROM GOD'S EARS TO HUMANITY ...and the
United Nations - Stop the arms trade | Embassy - Canada's Foreign Policy
Newspaper http://www.embassynews.ca/…/pope-francis-stop-the-arm…/47651
#cdnpoli via @EmbassyNews
Stop the arms trade
If politics must truly be at the service of the human person, it follows that it cannot be a slave to the economy and finance.
--------------
BLOGGED:
CANADA MILITARY NEWS: The World's
Hate John 15:17-27 / What does CANADA'S SOLDIER- Romeo Dallaire -Rwanda's
Saviour say/ Pope Francis calls on us- let's get cracking/no excuse Canadians
for voting-Afghan women did/Vietnam Boat Movement/Rwanada/UN complete betrayal
of world's humanity- gotta go /Wish we could have sponsored Anne Frank...as
WWII children she was our hero... so brave...so good...so decent/ Desiderata
-------------
God bless our troops- thank u for our
freedoms.... we realize in Afghanistan- words/paper don't influence pure evil -
and in all these years....
our beloved Afghans have NOT given up ...not once... except for screaming to the women of the world... 'where are u... why aren't u helping us???
and our NATO TROOPS SCREAMING... how can u call your sons and daughters of Nato flags to war- whilst u give medical help to the evil baby killing machine ...so they can come back and kill and destroy innocents and your troops... YET AGAIN?
our beloved Afghans have NOT given up ...not once... except for screaming to the women of the world... 'where are u... why aren't u helping us???
and our NATO TROOPS SCREAMING... how can u call your sons and daughters of Nato flags to war- whilst u give medical help to the evil baby killing machine ...so they can come back and kill and destroy innocents and your troops... YET AGAIN?
Discipline is the soul of an army. It
makes small numbers formidable; procures success to the weak, and esteem to
all. - George Washington
--------
-----------
1990
Liberia: A Human Rights
Disaster
Violations of the Laws of War by All Parties to the Conflict
Violations of the Laws of War by All Parties to the Conflict
---------
BLOGSPOT: Nov 5 2013
CANADA MILITARY NEWS- Nov 5:- AFGHANISTAN
FORMAL REPORT - UPDATED NOV 4 - Comic talkes -truth talking 4 world- ROBIN
WILLIAMS, JEFF FOXWORTHY, CHARLIE DANIELS, JOHN CLEESE, STEPHEN FRY-Hey United
Nations how bout some equality 4 girls, disdabled, kids ngays-lets get us some
freedom world -fix our own- God bless our Nato troops-God bless our Afghanistan
----
BLOGSPOT:
CANADA MILITARY NEWS: Canada
Peacekeepers Honour Roll- Honour /One Martyr Down: The Untold Story Of A
Canadian Peacekeeper Killed At War/RWANDA/stories/links- and always love and
respect
-----------
New climate war:
Billionaires vs. Big Oil
Published: Oct 30, 2013 12:01
a.m. ET
Commentary: 7 big challenges for the powerful leaders taking command
SAN LUIS OBISPO,
Calif. (MarketWatch) — Finally, Big Oil’s trillion-dollar war on climate change
is getting a serious challenge. This time it’s not just 28 Greenpeace activists
assaulting a Russian oil rig in the Arctic. Not 208 demonstrators at a Bay Area
Chevron refinery. Not another 1,252 arrests of Bill McKibben’s army of
environmental activists chaining themselves around the White House. This is a
declaration of war.
This time some very
high-profile Americans billionaires are upping the stakes, betting big, taking
a stand against Big Oil bullying with its trillions in profits and revenues
from the last decade, a $140 million war chest to spend on an army of 797
lobbyists, opposition ads and payments to climate-science-denying researchers
and academicians, plus donations to politicians and think tanks.
Big names, yes, but
still this David vs Goliath conflict has a long way to go and not much time for
a miracle. Who’s behind this new war? Power players: Mayor Michael Bloomberg and
former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a long-time conservationist, are
teaming up with billionaire Tom Steyer, the lightning rod who brought them
together.
In the latest
Bloomberg Markets, Edward Robinson writes that a year ago Steyer, founder of a
$20 billion Bay Area hedge-fund firm, was at a dinner hosted by the Treasury
Dept. focusing on the big issues worrying the financial community. They
“discussed China’s slowdown, Federal Reserve policy and other trends affecting
the U.S. economy.”
‘Biggest
game-changer’ putting Wall Street profits at huge risks
Steyer challenged the
others: “They were overlooking the biggest game-changer of all. He told the
group the country would have to overhaul its energy policy to address
greenhouse gas emissions.” Steyer’s “fellow guests were skeptical,” didn’t get
it. It was like “I was saying that what’s going to make a difference in the
economy is unicorns.” Wall Street and the financial community were clueless.
Soon after, Steyer’s
life mission became clear: “These guys need to be made aware of the risks
here.” They need a wake-up call. Four months later Steyer made a bold decision.
He ended “his 26-year career as a hedge-fund manager and set out to make an
economic case for addressing climate change,” teaming up with Bloomberg and
Paulson.
Steyer’s goal:
“Persuade investors, policy makers and the public that the consequences of
unchecked carbon emissions would eventually blow away whatever short-term costs
are involved in curbing the pollution.” As Bloomberg later put it: “Whether you
believe climate change is real or not is beside the point,” when he announced a
$20 billion plan to protect New York City in the next superstorm: “The bottom
line is, we can’t run the risk.”
But Big Oil is more
than willing to take that risk, to protect its $100 billion annual profits,
trillions in revenues the past decade. Yes, this is war. In fact, James Valvo,
policy director at the Koch Bros. financed “Americans for Prosperity”
lobbyists, is already on record opposing any regulation of greenhouse-gas
admissions.
Valvo’s already
counterattacked: “They’ll have to prove that it’s more economical to fix
climate change than to live with it.” And Exxon Mobil’s CEO Rex Tillerson sees
climate change as just an “engineering problem,” and humans will “adapt to a
sea-level rise.”
Billionaire
leaders vs. Big Oil trillions: the biggest climate war yet
Yes, this is an
assault on Big Oil. And you can expect to hear lots more counterattacks from
folks like Tillerson, U.S. Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom McDonough, Oklahoma Sen.
Jim Inhofe and the rest of the world’s climate-science deniers.
Warning bells got even
louder for Big Oil when the Steyer-Bloomberg-Paulson team announced they’re
“funding and co-chairing a study to calculate just how much economic risk
American industries and communities face as a warming atmosphere generates more
storms, droughts, floods and extreme heat.” Why? Their “Risky Business” study
will be published fast, in 2014, building on existing climate models developed
for the recent Fifth International Panel for Climate Science (ICPP), the U.S.
National Climate Assessment, the global reinsurer Munich Re and other key
sources.
On top of that, Robert
Rubin, another former Treasury secretary and former Secretary of State George
Shultz have already signed on as advisers. Expect more to come out of the
closet and jump on the anti-Big Oil bandwagon now that big names like Paulson
and Bloomberg are standing up to the bullies.
‘Risky
Business’: 7 big challenges in this new climate change war
We’ve been covering
climate change, global warming, environmental and population issues for several
years. The Steyer-Bloomberg-Paulson “Risky Business” project of powerful
leaders with clout has a real chance of achieving meaningful results. It comes along
at the right time, just as it was beginning to look too late even to
environmental activist Bill McKibben to face Big Oil’s war machine and get some
meaningful results.
Still, seven challenges already
define this venture as a truly “Risky Business”:
1. Is climate change inevitable? A war against hopelessness?
Paulson says “the biggest
problem we’re dealing with is a sense of hopelessness,” that leaders and citizens
see climate change as inevitable. Still, he’s fighting. He believes “we’re the
first generation with the knowledge and the ability to do something: We don’t
need new science, and we have great technology. We need the will to act now so
we don’t leave our children and grandchildren with a catastrophic burden.”
Steyer sees the study as the first step of a “larger strategy to reboot the
issue as a global priority.”
2. Will jobs rhetoric trump climate in future political battles?
Four years ago a bill to
regulate carbon pollution with a cap-and-trade system passed the House and went
to the Senate. The Petroleum Institute and coal industry argued that it “would
raise energy costs and spur unemployment.” The Senate’s Democratic leadership
killed the bill. Now Steyer warns, “the status quo is not a smart economic
thing to do.”
3. Will global obsession with short-term profits beat long-term?
Too much short-term thinking.
Bloomberg Markets’ Robinson uses an example: Last summer a shipping operator
sent iron-ore vessels from Russia to China on a new ice-free route, saving
$600,000 in fuel and 18 days. “The last time a new shipping route opened that
wasn’t a canal must have been hundreds of years ago,” this was “a very
lucrative possibility,” said the operator. Also, Lloyd’s of London estimates
“mining, shipping and energy interests may plow more than $100 billion into the
melting Arctic region in the next decade.”
4: Is the study too narrow, limited only to impact on America?
Americans for Prosperity’s Valvo
says that limiting the Steyer plan to measuring only the economic impact on
America is flawed because “climate change is the most complicated issue there
is because of the extraterritorial impacts ... caused by global emissions and
affects every country on the planet.” But as Tillerson might say, “it’s an
engineering problem with an engineering solution.”
5: Is the science of climate forecasting too inexact?
Even climate scientists say
climate models may be “too generalized” for accurate forecasting. To counteract
that possibility Robinson notes “the Risky Business project will be directed by
a 10-member interdisciplinary team of economists and climatologists. It will
divide the U.S. into eight regions and present findings for each part of the
country as a range of probabilities, similar to an insurer’s actuarial table.”
Earlier this year Munich Re, the leading global reinsurer, whose members
include 95 insurers worldwide, had already tackled that on a broader scale.
6: Is it too late to create effective policies and action plans?
The “Risky Business” project is
the first move in the battle with Big Oil. It’s also a race against time. After
reading a Foreign Policy article by environmental activist Bill McKibben, I
asked him about his comment that it may already be “too late.” He said the
“choice may still be in our hands, so we may as well work on it.” That was a
couple years ago. Nicholas Stern, head of London’s Grantham Research Institute
on Climate Change, now predicts the world may warm 5 more degrees by 2100. We
already know what a small increase of 0.8 degree is doing. A 3- to 5-degree
increase “would cause major changes in rivers, a collapse of the monsoon cycle
in Asia, and trigger deep conflicts.” And as Bloomberg warns: “we can’t run the
risk” of doing nothing.
7: Is it time to focus on the population growth impact too?
If we have one criticism, it’s the apparent absence
of directly confronting the impact of population growth in all studies — ICPP,
Munich Re, U.S. agencies and now perhaps in Steyer-Bloomberg-Paulson’s “Risky
Business.” As we said in “World’s top problem is overpopulation not climate,”
we are is adding more risk as the U.N., World Bank and other sources predict
global population to jump from 7 billion today to a range of 9 billion to 11 billion
by 2050. Failure to deal with population growth will just keep erasing any
well-meaning ongoing progress in this new war to control the impact of climate
change.
--------------
Blogspot:
Canada Military News: Sep 5- Canada
Aunt DID NOT sponsor Syrian boy or father 2 Canada- MEDIA lied without
factfinding/Billions of Christians are sick 2 death of Muslim on Muslim hate
spewing out on a world that has horrific poverty-CANADA FIX UR POVERTY AND
JOBLESS FIRST B4 $$$BILLIONAIRE MUSLIM NATIONS REFUGEES- electronic world
versis the real world / over 3 billion people less than $2.50 a day/ Canada
Single Moms, poverty and horrific treatment-Canada's worst secret plus First
Nations complete mess of opportunities and political indifference/UNITED
NATIONS MUST DISBAND OVER THEIR INAPTITUDE/Canada stuff-politics/Ukraine
whiteman's war isa disgrace of a beautiful people-shame on ya/PAEDOPHILE
HUNTING /Canada News/on this day our troops the heroes of this world/our
environment matters Canada/ One Billion Rising-NEDA/if Canada does Refugee- 5
points of order and help tips/QUOTE: In the process, Syria has become the
graveyard of U.S. credibility
----------
Charlie
did it
by Paul Wolf, 7 June 2003
Date:
Sat, 7 Jun 2003 13:22:18 -0400 (EDT)
From: Paul Wolf <paulwolf@icdc.com>
Subject: Charlie did it
From: Paul Wolf <paulwolf@icdc.com>
Subject: Charlie did it
- Charlie did it (6/6/03)
- Excerpt from Afghanistan: A Military History from Alexander the Great to the Fall of the Taliban (2003)
Introduction
The withdrawal of the Soviet Union from
Afghanistan in 1989, following ten very frustrating years fighting the
CIA-backed mujahideen, led directly, according to many, to the breakup of the
USSR.
The results in Afghanistan were no less
destabilizing. While the Afghans may have been liberated from Soviet
occupation, instead they suffered fourteen years of civil war. There is not
much to celebrate today, with half the capital, Kabul, in ruins, protected by
US and European occupying forces, and warlords with private armies controlling
most of the rest of the country. Twenty four years of war have taken a heavy
toll on Afghanistan, a country with no telephone system, few paved roads, an
illiterate population, an estimated 5-7 million unaccounted-for land mines, and
various other problems that rival those of any other place on Earth.
Every day I walk through the streets, going
whereever I am going, passing by dozens of beggars, some of whom will follow me
for blocks, grabbing onto my arm they'll follow me all across the city until I
give them a one Afghan note -- worth two cents -- that's all they want. They
seem happy with it and run away as if afraid I'm going to change my mind and
take it back.
I also pass children looking for treasure in the
piles of garbage and open sewers where trash is thrown. There are no trash
collection or sewage services anywhere in the city.
Such is the price of freedom, from communist oppression,
from islamic fundamentalism. The country has been repeatedly destroyed, its
development prevented, and still no one helps the poor Afghan people.
Today I learned that the law professors at the
University of Kabul, who are helping me with my research project, earn between
$25 to $30 per month. They are not happy about it and realize it's a low
salary. But they are among the few Afghan government employees who are actually
being paid.
The police and military, who earn about $40 per
month, have not been paid in at least five months, the law professors say. This
doesn't bode well for a nation dominated by opium-financed private armies, with
an ineffective and distrusted central government. By comparison, many of the UN
and World Bank funded NGO's -- who comprise the de facto government of
Afghanistan -- pay their workers between $3000 and $5000 monthly, easily one
hundred times the salary of a law professor, government bureaucrat, or police
or military officer.
I say they are the de facto government because
the combined NGO budget is about ten times that of the Afghan government, and
foreign NGO's have, under the authority of the Bonn Agreement which established
the current government here, set up commissions for human rights, judicial,
civil service, and constitutional reform. These high priced consultants, who
have no interaction with the common people of Afghanistan, are deeply resented
by the common people here, who think they are stealing the international aid
money meant for the desperately poor Afghan people. One professor told me today
that the world does not consider Afghan people to be human beings.
None of this will be written into the history of
Afghanistan. The man with the turban pulling a cart ten times his own size
doesn't count for much; neither does the widow sitting in the street with her
malnourished babies on display. These people just live here. Their children and
grandchildren will doubtless give their lives, as have so many before, to fight
foreign wars in Afghanistan. One Afghan legal scholar asked me what the
American people thought about Afghanistan. I said the first thing that came to
mind -- Osama bin Laden. He got a good laugh out of it.
- Paul
Kabul, Afghanistan
June 7, 2003
Kabul, Afghanistan
June 7, 2003
Charlie did it
By George Crile, The Financial Times, June 6 2003
In the early summer of 1980, Texas Congressman
Charlie Wilson walked off the floor of the House of Representatives into the
Speaker's Lobby, a rich, wood- paneled room that stretches along the full
length of the House floor. A Teletype at one end spewed out stories from AP,
UPI and Reuters. Wilson was a news junkie, and he reached down and began
reading a story datelined from Kabul.
The article described hundreds of thousands of
refugees fleeing Afghanistan as Soviet helicopter gunships leveled villages,
slaughtered livestock, and killed anyone who harbored guerrillas resisting the
occupation. What caught Wilson's attention, however, was the reporter's
conclusion that the Afghan warriors were refusing to quit. The article described
how they were murdering Russians in the dead of night with knives and pistols,
hitting them over the head with shovels and stones. Against all odds, there was
a growing rebellion under way against the Red Army.
It would have been a sobering insight for the
Communist rulers if they could have followed what happened in the few minutes
after Wilson finished reading the Associated Press dispatch. The mysterious
force in the U.S. government that was destined to hound the Red Army with a
seemingly limitless flood of ever more lethal and sophisticated weapons was
about to be activated.
No one, however, was paying attention, not even
in the American government, when Charlie Wilson picked up a phone and called
the Appropriations Committee staffer who dealt with "black
appropriations", the CIA funds. The man's name was Jim Van Wagenen, a
former college professor and one-time FBI agent. Wilson had just been named to
the Defense Appropriations subcommittee. He was now part of the band of twelve
men in the House responsible for funding CIA operations.
The congressman knew enough about the eccentric
workings of the subcommittee to know when a member can act alone to fund a
program. "How much are we giving the Afghans?" he asked Van Wagenen.
"Five million," said the staffer.
There was a moment's silence. "Double
it," said the Texan.
So far as anyone can tell, no congressman prior
to Charlie Wilson had ever moved unsolicited to increase a CIA budget. From the
beginning of the Cold War, Congress had granted that exclusive right to the
president. But as dramatic as the doubling might sound, it had no visible
impact on the war. It wasn't reported or debated, and it never even registered
on the KGB's radar screen in Russia. At best, all it did was provide the
mujahideen with a few thousand more Enfield rifles and perhaps some machine
guns, so that they could go out and die for their faith in greater numbers.
Wilson's intervention had not cost the
congressman much more than a telephone call to a key staffer and a few additional
minutes when the subcommittee met to appropriate the nation's secret
intelligence budget. It was an impulsive action, a personal gesture to bolster
a painfully inadequate U.S. program. Wilson so easily crossed the line into
this covert arena that no one stopped to question his right to be there or
worry about the precedent he might be setting. It would be another two years
before he would return to put this precedent to the test. But this is where he
first demonstrated that there could be another power center in the American
government, one that could act in a way that was totally unpredictable to drive
a U.S. covert policy.
The truth is, there were always two Charlie
Wilsons at work in Washington. But he was moving heaven and earth in those days
to allow only one image to surface, and to promote that image so loudly that no
one would go looking for the other. To begin with, he staffed his office almost
exclusively with tall, startlingly beautiful women. They were famous on the
Hill, known to all as "Charlie's Angels". And to his colleagues'
amazement, whenever questioned about this practice, Wilson invariably responded
with one of his favorite lines: "You can teach them how to type, but you
can't teach them to grow tits." That was the way he tended to present
himself in public, which was tame compared to the way he decorated his condo.
It was almost a caricature of what Hugh Hefner might have designed as the
ultimate bachelor's lair. Manly hedonism was the theme, down to the last
detail: mirrored walls, an emperor's size bed outfitted with plush down pillows
and a royal blue bed cover, an entertainment center featuring a giant
television and stereo, and a gleaming tanning bed to maintain his year-round
tan. Finally, the congressman's most distinctive innovation: the Jacuzzi, not
hidden away in the bathroom but so deliberately situated in the center of the
bedroom that it forced the unsuspecting eye to draw all the worst possible
conclusions about the man who slept in this room. Particularly when visitors came
close and discovered silver handcuffs dangling elegantly from a hook within
easy reach of the tub. The site of these instruments of hedonism invariably
left his colleagues and distinguished guests speechless.
It would be an exaggeration to suggest that this
was all a false front. Charlie Wilson, after all, is a bona fide hedonist. But
he is also guilty of concealing his other identity. It's only when he's alone
and everyone else is sleeping that the other Charlie Wilson surfaces. It's a
nightly affair. Usually at about three or four a.m. he finds himself awake and
turns to his library, with its thick volumes of military history. He's not like
other insomniacs, who simply try to get back to sleep. He reads like a scholar
steeped in his field but also like a man in search of something personal,
poring through accounts of the struggles of the world and the men who counted -
Roosevelt, Kennedy, and all the great generals.
But invariably, it is to the biographies and
speeches and histories of Winston Churchill that Wilson always returns on these
night journeys, to read again and again about the man who was cast into the
political wilderness, written off as an alcoholic alarmist, and then, when all
was lost, rose to the occasion to save his country and his civilization from
the darkness of Hitler. It's no wonder that Charlie Wilson never shared his
sense of personal destiny. It wouldn't have made much sense when what he was
most noted for at the time was an investigation by a team of federal
prosecutors into what precisely he had got up to in the Fantasy Suite hot tub
at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas with two long-legged showgirls and "an
endless supply" of cocaine. This was not the time even to have whispered
of his inner conviction that he and Winston Churchill might have something --
anything -- in common.
Nor did he explain why the painting over his bed,
his one steady nightly companion, was like a talisman to him. The painting -- a
lone pilot in the cockpit of a Spitfire, patrolling the night skies of London --
had hung over his boyhood bed in tiny Trinity, Texas, at a time when the Nazis
were sweeping across Europe. Night after night, on the second floor of the
white frame house, in the corner room that Charlie shared with his uncle Jack,
the boy would sit staring out the window, ever vigilant; searching the sky for
signs of Japanese bombers and fighter planes, whose characteristics were burned
upon the memory of this seven-year-old defender of Trinity. "They aren't
coming, Charlie," his kindly uncle Jack would assure him. "But if
they do, you'll be the first to see them."
Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan's historic
North-West Frontier, is the last stop before Afghanistan on the famed Grand
Trunk Highway, which originates in New Delhi. It's a historic smugglers
crossroads, an intrigue-filled city that was home to the British colonial army,
which maintained garrisons there and which Rudyard Kipling immortalized in his
poems and novels. By 1982 it had also become the not very secret center of the
Afghan resistance. All the Americans who would later make this passage to
Peshawar experienced the same giddy sensation of entering a time warp. There is
a sound in the streets of this city that must be experienced to be understood.
It's like being inside a beehive -- a whirl of turbans, beards, ox-drawn
wagons, brightly painted buses; motor scooters turned into rickshaws and driven
by Pashtun tribesmen. Every face looks biblical, and everything is in motion on
the streets: money changers, rug merchants, horse-drawn carts, men washing
their feet and hands at the entrances of mosques, young boys scurrying about
with trays of freshly baked Afghan bread and tea.
Peshawar was only thirty miles from the Afghan
border and minutes from the sprawling refugee camps. There were hidden
storehouses, and Afghan commanders living behind walled compounds surrounded by
armed bodyguards. This was home to the leaders of the seven mujahideen military
parties that the US Central Intelligence Agency and Pakistan's Inter-Services
Intelligence Directorate (ISI) had created to organize the war effort. But no
one offered to take Wilson to visit these secret warriors. He hadn't yet earned
the right to pass freely into that world. His schedule on his first trip to
Peshawar called for the traditional tour of the U.N.-supported refugee camps, a
scene that appalled everyone who came to Peshawar: millions of proud Afghans
living in mud huts without running water or the ability to feed themselves. In
the month of his visit twenty thousand more had poured in -- young boys and
girls dressed in right tribal clothing; the women with their faces covered.
They came from the mountains and valleys of a country where their ancestors had
lived for centuries, a legendary warrior nation not easy to intimidate and uproot.
All brought horror stories of what had caused
them to flee their country. In particular they talked of helicopter gunships
that hovered over their villages, hounding them even as they fled. It began to
dawn on Wilson that there were only Afghans in this part of Pakistan and that
he was witnessing an entire nation in flight from the Communists. This
spectacle of mass suffering roused him but he had been to refugee camps before
and for him there was something almost impersonal about such a mass of humanity.
What did catch his attention that day was the absence of men -- no teenagers,
not even forty or fifty year olds. He was told they were all fighting in the
jihad.
It was at his next stop, the Red Cross hospital
on the edge of Peshawar, that he lost his heart to the Afghans. Scores of young
men were laid out on hospital cots. The doctors sat with Wilson at the bed of a
young boy and explained that his hand had been blown off by a Russian butterfly
mine designed to look like a toy. This threw Wilson into a rage. A young Afghan
who had stepped on a land mine explained he was proud of his sacrifice.
"He told me his only regret was that he couldn't have his feet grown back
so he could go kill Russians."
Wilson moved from bed to bed, undone by the
carnage but increasingly aware why most of them were there. He spoke to a
wounded commander as the effects of an anaesthetic started to kick in. The man
was waving his hand in a circle, speaking in Pashtun, describing the horror of
the Russian gunship that had put him there. Not one of them complained about
their lost limbs. But every one of them described their fury at the Russian
gunships. And to a man, they asked for only one thing -- a weapon to ring down
this tool of Satan. Wilson wanted desperately to give something to these
warriors and, before leaving, he donated a pint of his own blood.
His next stop was a meeting with a council of
Afghan elders, hundreds of whom were waiting for him in a huge colorful tent,
decorated with cotton fabrics that looked like floating Oriental rugs. As he
walked in, Wilson was dazed by the sight of long white beards and turbans, and
the men's fierce, unblinking eyes. The Pakistanis had told them that the
congressman had come as a friend offering assistance, and as he entered they shouted,
"Allahu Akbar" -- God is Great.
To Wilson it was like a scene out of the Old
Testament. When the elders invited the Texan to speak, he delivered what he
thought would be just the right message. "I told them that they were the
most courageous people in the world and I said, 'We're going to help you. None
of your families will suffer from lack of shelter and food.' I pledged that
their soldiers would not be left to die in agony and that we would give them
millions in humanitarian assistance."
An old man rose to respond. He told Wilson he
could keep his bandages and rice. What they needed was a weapon to destroy the
gunships. These old men were no different from the young warriors in the
hospital. They were all fixated on the Russian Mi-24 Hind helicopter. It was at
this moment that Charlie Wilson realized he was in the presence of a people who
didn't care about sympathy. They didn't want medicine or charity. They wanted
revenge.
And they got it -- courtesy of Charlie Wilson.
When the last Soviet soldier walked out of Afghanistan on February 15 1989,
there were many who echoed the words of Pakistan's military leader General Zia
ul-Haq: "Charlie did it". Not the least of these was the CIA itself,
which four years later treated Congressman Wilson to a rare honour inside its
headquarters in Langley, Virginia. On a large screen on the stage of the
auditorium was that very quotation, and beneath it the words: "President
Zia ul-Haq explaining the defeat of the Russians in Afghanistan."
Throughout the 1980s the Afghan mujahideen were
America's surrogate soldiers in the brutal guerrilla war that became the Soviet
Union's Vietnam, a defeat that helped trigger the subsequent collapse of the
Communist empire. Afghanistan was a secret war that the CIA fought and won without
debates in Congress or protests in the street. It was not just the CIA's
biggest operation, it was the biggest secret war in history. In the course of a
decade, billions of rounds of ammunition and hundreds of thousands of weapons
were smuggled across the border on the backs of camels, mules, and donkeys. At
one point over 300,000 fundamentalist Afghan warriors carried weapons provided
by the CIA; thousands were trained in the art of urban terror. Before it was
over, some 28,000 Soviet soldiers were killed.
It was January of 1989, just as the Red Army was
preparing to withdraw its last soldiers from Afghanistan, when Charlie Wilson
called to invite me to join him on a fact-finding tour of the Middle East. I
had produced a CBS 60 Minutes profile of Wilson several months earlier
and had no intention of digging further into his role in the Afghan war. But I
quickly accepted the invitation. The trip began in Kuwait, moved on to Saddam
Hussein's Iraq, and then to Saudi Arabia -- a grand tour that took us to all
three of the countries that would soon take center stage in the Gulf War. For
me, the trip was just the beginning of a decade-long odyssey.
There were two surprises on that trip,
revelations that opened my eyes to a bigger story: the first was the princely
reception given to Wilson wherever he went in the Arab world. The second was my
introduction to Gust Avrakotos, the CIA agent who had worked closely with
Wilson ("As I saw it," Avrakotos once said, "the tie that bound
us together was chasing pussy and killing Communists.") Avrakotos recently
retired from the Agency and was reunited with his co-conspirator for the first
time in several years. As we moved from Kuwait down to the battlefield of
Basra, where hundreds of thousands had died in the closing battles of the
Iran-Iraq War, I began talking to Avrakotos, and in short order I realized that
the Afghan campaign had been anything but a typical CIA program.
When our commercial flight back to Baghdad was
canceled, Avrakotos managed to get us onto a lavish Boeing 707 owned by a Saudi
religious leader by telling him about Wilson's role in the Afghan war. We
shared the flight with a delegation of holy men from the strict Wahhabi sect,
some of whom were still sending money and Arab volunteers to the jihad in
Afghanistan. The plane was, in effect, a flying mosque: luxuriously outfitted
with solid-gold bathroom fixtures, soft leather seats, and numerous monitors
that tracked the direction of Mecca for the plane's passengers. In Riyadh, a
royal receiving party met us at the airport. A caravan of brand-new white
Mercedes-Benzes, complete with police escort, swept us off to the palace for a
meeting with the king's brother, Saudi defense minister Prince Sultan. After
tea, Wilson delivered his message: he had come to thank the Saudi royal family
for its extraordinary generosity in matching the Americans dollar for dollar in
Afghanistan. It became clear that the gratitude went both ways when Wilson was
shown to his quarters several hours later -- a preposterously lavish suite with
a living room that seemed to be the size of a football field.
"We want you to know, Mr. Congressman,"
the prince's aide said, "that these are larger quarters than we provided
for George Bush. Mr. Bush is only the vice president. You won the Afghan
war."
Throughout the Muslim world, the victory of the
Afghans over the army of a modern superpower was seen as a transformational
event. But back home, no one seemed to be aware that something important had
taken place and that the United States had been the moving force behind it. Any
chance of an American appreciation for the Afghan miracle was fast
disappearing, as one incredible event after another began to unravel the Soviet
eastern bloc. That August, Lech Walesa and his movement pushed aside the
Communists and took power in Poland. hen in November, the ultimate symbol of
Communist oppression, the Berlin Wall, came down. It was just nine months after
the Red Army's humiliating retreat from Afghanistan, and the dominoes were now
falling in central and Eastern Europe. As Charlie Wilson saw it, his Afghans
had played a decisive role in helping to trigger and hasten the collapse of the
Communist eastern bloc. More than a million Afghans had died, and no one had
ever thanked them for their sacrifice.
Throughout the war, Wilson had always told his
colleagues that Afghanistan was the one morally unambiguous cause that the
United States had supported since World War II -- and never once had any member
of Congress stood up to protest or question the vast expenditures. But with the
departure of the Soviets, the war was anything but morally unambiguous. By 1990
the Afghan freedom fighters had suddenly and frighteningly gone back to form,
re-emerging as nothing more than feuding warlords obsessed with settling
generations-old scores. The difference was that they were now armed with
hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of weapons and explosives of every
conceivable type. The justification for the huge CIA operation had been to halt
Soviet aggression, not to take sides in a tribal war -- certainly not to
transform the killing capacity of these warriors.
Wilson proposed a billion-dollar U.S. aid package
to begin rebuilding Afghanistan and did his best to rally support. He set off
for Moscow to see what could be done to end the surrogate war that continued to
rage. The Russians were pumping an estimated $3 billion a year into Afghanistan
to prop up the puppet government led by Najibullah, while the CIA, with Saudi
matching funds, maintained the enormous flow of weapons to the feuding
warlords.
Andre Kozyrev, the future Russian foreign
minister, told Charlie that the United States and Russia now had a common
interest in stabilizing Afghanistan and particularly in preventing radical
Islamic elements from taking power. The Soviets' preoccupation, Kozyrev
explained, was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the mujahideen leader who had so impressed
the Afghans' American champions and whose close ties to Pakistan's ISI made him
the leading recipient of CIA weaponry. Kozyrev insisted that Gulbuddin's brand
of militant Islam was just as dangerous to America as it was to the Soviet
Union -- a point Charlie had heard frequently that year from his own side.
What struck Wilson most on his visit was not
Kozyrev's reasoned appeal, but the discovery that, whatever the sins of the
Communist regime, the people of Russia had been liberated. He witnessed the
explosion of religious faith after years of repression, and he attended a
daring production of the musical Hair in the union hall of a cigarette factory.
But everywhere, the scarcity of consumer goods shocked and saddened him. This,
he realized, was a defeated nation.
In the second year after the Soviet withdrawal,
Wilson delivered another $250 million for the CIA to keep its Afghan program intact.
With Saudi matching funds, the mujahideen would receive another half a billion
dollars to wage war.
The expectation was that they would join forces
for a final push to throw out the Soviet-backed Najibullah regime, restore
order, and begin the process of rebuilding. The Agency even sent word to Wilson
that as an act of gratitude for the renewed budget, the mujahideen planned to
take Jalalabad by June 1, Charlie's birthday. It didn't happen. Instead the
Najibullah forces held, as the Afghans bickered and disgraced themselves by
massacring prisoners.
That year, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait; adding
insult to injury, Gulbuddin and Abu Sayaf -- the mujahideen leader closest to
the Saudis -- both publicly sided with Saddam Hussein against the United States.
Their subsidies, however, continued. With the news from Afghanistan growing
darker, Charlie escaped so deep into drink that he began attending sessions of
the congressional chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous. At best he was operating on
automatic pilot, rarely attending the special briefings the Agency put on for
him and refusing to meet with the mujahideen when they came to Washington. It
was almost as if he didn't want to see or hear what was happening to his old
freedom fighters.
Finally, on April Fools' Day, 1991, there was
good news from the front -- very good news. Wilson learned that his favorite
commander, Jalaluddin Haqani, had "liberated" Khost. The first major
Afghan city was now in the hands of the freedom fighters, and it was in no
small measure due to the introduction of a series of lethal new weaponry
provided by Wilson. Soon after, I accompanied Wilson's administrative
assistant, Charlie Schnabel, to meet up with Haqani and take stock of how the
mujahideen were conducting themselves as they began to reclaim their country.
The stories we heard once we reached Pakistan were alarming. The mujahideen
were hijacking the US AID trucks, making regular runs impossible. At Friday
prayers, the mullahs were inflaming their followers with accounts of Western
NGO volunteers teaching Afghan women to wash with soap. An enraged mob had
marched on the facility that provided free health care to women, now convinced
that the clinic was promoting free sex. They burned the facility to the ground
and trashed seventeen cars -- $1.8 million in damage in just one day. Afghan
women working in refugee camps as teachers and nurses were threatened; one had
just been kidnapped and murdered. In Peshawar, the American consul relayed a
particularly horrific account of one of Gulbuddin's many outrages. A few months
earlier he had sought to "liberate" Khost by shelling the civilian
population of the city.
Khost was like a ghost town when we arrived. The
bazaar, which had been full just days before, was empty. Everyone had fled the
liberators. Nothing moved except armed mujahideen soldiers. Many of the
warriors were said to be radical Arabs who had come to get in on the jihad.
There was little sign of life and few prospects of people returning anytime
soon. Instead of devoting its energies to rebuilding Afghanistan, as they had
hoped, the State Department's Cross Border Humanitarian Aid Program found
itself following the liberators in a desperate attempt to persuade them not to
murder and pillage.
None of this attracted any real attention in the
world press, which had either forgotten about or lost interest in Afghanistan
-- in spite of the fact that the CIA and KGB were continuing to mount the
largest covert Cold War battle in history. For all practical purposes, the Cold
War was over, and it seemed as if the United States and Russia had come to
share roughly the same long-term goals in Afghanistan. The only logical
explanation for why the two superpowers were now funding this mysterious war of
the tribes was the force of inertia. Simply put, neither side wanted to be the
first to pull back.
It was almost unthinkable, but Ambassador Robert
Oakley now wondered if the US-backed Afghans, no longer menaced by the Red
Army, were any different from the Afghans whom the Russians were backing. In
fact, it was the leaders of the Afghan puppet government who were saying all
the right things, even paying lip service to democratic change. The mujahideen,
on the other hand, were committing unspeakable atrocities and couldn't even put
aside their bickering and murderous thoughts long enough to capture Kabul.
Oakley kept coming upon the same signpost "What's a nice group of kids
like us doing in a place like this?" Without the Russians around, did we
really want to be giving long-range Stingers, satellite-guided mortars, burst
transmitters, and hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of ordnance to these
men?
Wilson was surprised that spring to hear that the
administration was not putting in a request for more money. There had been
meetings in Wilson's office and talks with Judge William Webster, the new
director of Central Intelligence, about the coming year's budget, but the
Agency was no longer of a single mind. The Bush administration, however, wanted
out of this game -- so the CIA's seventh floor had no choice but to reflect the
opinion of their masters in the White House.
With no request for funds, the Senate Select
Committee met and reported out a bill with nothing in it for Afghanistan. On
September 30, 1991, the end of the fiscal year, the flow of weapons,
ammunition, and supplies that the mujahideen had so dearly loved would stop.
But for Charlie Wilson, there was something fundamentally wrong with his war
ending then and there. He didn't like the idea of the United States going out
with a whimper. The president might want to end the war, but it wasn't his war
to end. It had always been Congress's war, and just because there was disarray
at the CIA didn't mean Congress should step back. That was the essence of the
appeal Wilson made to his highly reluctant colleagues on the House Intelligence
Committee when they met to consider the annual budget. Incredibly, he carried
the day. No one knew how to say no to Charlie.
"Where will we get the money?" the
chairman of the Intelligence Committee asked.
"It doesn't matter," Wilson said in his
most selfless tone. "Take it from a Texas defense contract. Whatever. The
main thing is: this body should not be cutting off the mujahideen."
"Well, shit. How about $25 million?" asked the chairman, meaning $25
million per quarter, $100 million for the year. "How about $50
million?" Wilson responded. And $50 million a quarter is what they
ultimately agreed on. With the Saudi contribution, that meant another $400
million for the mujahideen.
It was only the beginning of the extraordinary
maneuvers Wilson had to make to push this bill through a highly reluctant
Congress. By then even his most reliable ally, John Murtha, the chairman of the
Defense Appropriations subcommittee, wanted to end the CIA program. Murtha was
appalled at reports of the mujahideen's drug trafficking, but in the end he
stood with Charlie, and his support guaranteed the bill's passage in the House.
It was passed in the Senate that fall. The secret appropriation was hidden in
the $298 billion Defense bill for fiscal year 1992. When it was presented for a
vote, no one but the interested few noticed the $200 million earmarked for the
Afghans.
And so, as the mujahideen were poised for their
thirteenth year of war, instead of being cut off; it turned out to be a banner
year. They found themselves with not only a $400 million budget but also with a
cornucopia of new weaponry sources that opened up when the United States
decided to send the Iraqi weapons captured during the Gulf War to the
mujahideen.
However disgraceful the mujahideen's conduct was
in the following months, in April 1992 they managed to stop fighting one
another long enough to take Kabul. Once again Charlie felt vindicated. He had
stayed the course and allowed the victory that belonged to the Afghans to
occur. But then everything became ugly. By August, the interim foreign
minister, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, was outside of the capital, with his artillery
shelling the positions of his former comrade in arms, the interim defense
minister Ahmad Shah Massoud. Kabul, which had survived the entire Afghan war
relatively intact, was suddenly subjected to intense urban warfare. Before it
was over, close to 40 percent of the housing was destroyed; the art museum was
leveled; the palace ravaged.
Under normal circumstances, such misuse of
American resources should have led to a scandal or at least entered the
American consciousness as an issue of concern. But the anarchy in Kabul was
completely overshadowed by the historic events sweeping the world. In December
1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Everywhere across the twelve time zones
of the former Soviet Union, statues of Lenin were coming down and freedom was
breaking out in a Russia reborn. People were now referring to the United States
as the world's lone superpower.
For the men who ruled the CIA, Afghanistan was
acknowledged as the main catalyst that helped trigger these historic changes.
Flush with the glory of tumbling dominoes and convinced that the Afghan
campaign had been the key to it all, the Directorate of Operations led a
ceremony on a sunny humid June day in 1993 to recognize the man who had made it
possible. Without Charlie Wilson, Director Woolsey said in his comments,
"History might have been hugely different and sadly different". It wasn't
the parade that Charlie had sought, but then no other member of Congress,
indeed no outsider, had ever been singled out by the CIA for such an
accomplishment. If that's where it all had ended for Charlie Wilson -- standing
tall at the CIA's Langley headquarters that day with the fear of nuclear war
fast receding and America now the world's only superpower - then it truly would
have been a Cold War fairy tale come true.
But that's not the way history works. Inevitably,
great events have unintended consequences. What no one involved anticipated was
that it might be dangerous to awaken the dormant dreams and visions of Islam.
Which is, of course, exactly what happened. There were many early warnings well
before Charlie's award at Langley. In January of that year, a young Pakistani,
Mir Aimal Kasi, walked down the line of cars at the gates of the CIA and calmly
murdered two officers before escaping to Pakistan where he was embraced as a
folk hero. A month later a bomb went off in the car park of the World Trade
Center. What emerged from the smoke was a clear indication that some of the
veterans of the Afghan campaign now identified America as their enemy.
As early as a year before at Khost, a haunting
portrait of the future was already in place: battle-hardened Afghan mujahideen,
armed to the teeth and broken down into rival factions -- one of the largest
being a collection of Arab and Muslim volunteers from around the world.
Pakistan's former intelligence chief, Hamid Gul, maintains that over the course
of the jihad, up to thirty thousand volunteers from other countries had come
into Pakistan to take part in the holy war. What now seems clear is that, under
the umbrella of the CIA's program, Afghanistan had become a gathering place for
militant Muslims from around the world, a virtual Mecca for radical Islamists.
As early as the Gulf War, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, long the main recipient of CIA
weaponry, had articulated his belief that the United States was seeking world
domination and control of Muslim oil. The man Charlie once described as
"goodness personified," Jalaluddin Haqani, had long been a gateway
for Saudi volunteers, and for years the CIA had no problem with such
associations. Osama bin Laden was one of those volunteers who could frequently
be found in the same area where Charlie had been Haqani's honored guest. As the
CIA's favorite commander, Haqani had received bags of money each month from the
station in Islamabad.
The presumption at Langley had been that when the
United States packed its bags and cut off the Afghans, the jihad would simply
burn itself out. If the Afghans insisted on killing one another, it would be a
shame but not America's problem. Perhaps that policy would have worked out had
it been only weapons that we left behind. But the more dangerous legacy of the
Afghan war is found in the minds and convictions of Muslims around the world.
To them the miracle victory over the Soviets was all the work of Allah -- not
the billions of dollars that America and Saudi Arabia poured into the battle,
not the ten-year commitment of the CIA that turned an army of primitive
tribesmen into technoholy warriors. The consequence for America of having waged
a secret war and never acknowledging or advertising its role was that we set in
motion the s pirit of jihad and the belief in our surrogate soldiers that,
having brought down one superpower, they could just as easily take on another.
The morning of September 11, 2001, broke bright
and shining in the nation's capital. As was his custom before leaving for work,
Charlie Wilson walked out on to his terrace to take in the spectacular view.
Never in history had a nation accumulated such dominance over the rest of the
world as the United States had in the decade following the Soviet collapse.
Wilson's name was all but unknown to most Americans, but as he looked out over
the monuments and the historic houses of government, he had every reason to
believe that he had played a part in the startling disappearance of America's
greatest enemy.
A call from a friend interrupted his morning
ritual: "Do you have your television on?" The sight of the World
Trade Center in flames stunned him, but like most Americans, he assumed it had
to have been a horrendous accident. Some ten minutes later he was watching when
the second plane appeared on screen and flew straight into the second tower. A
sickening realization gripped him: it had to be the work of terrorists, and, if
so, he had little doubt that the killers were Muslims.
"I didn't know what to think, but figured if
I got downtown I could learn more." By then Wilson had retired from
Congress and was working as a lobbyist, with Pakistan as one of his main
accounts. At 9:43 am, half an hour after the first attack, he was driving
across the Fourteenth Street Bridge with the windows up and news radio blasting
so loud that he didn't hear the explosion that rocked the Pentagon less than a
mile away.
For five straight nights he watched, until the
fires were finally put down and the smoke cleared. He didn't know what to make
of it all at first. When the photographs of the nineteen hijackers appeared in
n ewspapers across the country, he took some comfort in pointing out that they
were all Arabs, not Afghans. "It didn't register with me for a week or two
that this thing was all based in my mountains."
For most Americans, the events of 9/11 were
quickly tied to Afghanistan when it was learned that the hijackers had all
spent time there. Much was made of this by the Bush administration, which
assailed the Taliban for harboring Osama bin Laden and for allowing Afghanistan
to become a breeding ground for international terrorists. The American public
rallied behind the president when he launched his "war on terror".
But almost everyone seemed confused about who the terrorists were, and all but
clueless to explain why they hated the United States so much.
The question is not so difficult to understand if
you put yourself in the shoes of the Afghan veterans in the aftermath of the
Soviet departure. Within months, the U.S. government "discovered"
what it had known for the past eight years -- that Pakistan was hard at work on
the Islamic bomb. (The dirty little secret of the Afghan war was that Zia had
extracted a concession early on from Reagan: Pakistan would work with the CIA
against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and in return the United States would
provide massive aid but would agree to look the other way on the question of
the bomb.) But with the Russians gone, sanctions were imposed and all military
and economic assistance was cut off. A fleet of F-16s that Pakistan had already
purchased was withheld. Within a year, the Clinton Administration would move to
place Pakistan on the list of state sponsors of terrorism for its support of
Kashmiri freedom fighters. The Pakistan military had long been the surrogates
for the CIA, and every Afghan and Arab mujahid came to believe that America had
betrayed the Pakistanis. And when the United States kept its troops (including
large numbers of women) in Saudi Arabia, not just bin Laden but most Islamists believed
that America wanted to seize the Islamic oil fields and was seeking world
domination.
By the end of 1993, in Afghanistan itself there
were no roads, no schools, just a destroyed country -- and the United States
was washing its hands of any responsibility. It was in this vacuum that the
Taliban and Osama bin Laden would emerge as the dominant players. It is ironic
that a man who had had almost nothing to do with the victory over the Red Army,
Osama bin Laden, would come to personify the power of the jihad. In 1998, when
bin Laden survived $100 million worth of cruise missiles targeted at him, it
reinforced the belief that Allah had chosen to protect him against the
infidels.
It's not what Charlie Wilson had in mind when he
took up the cause of the Afghans. Nevertheless, in spite of 9/11 and all the
horrors that have flowed from it, he steadfastly maintains that it was all
worth it and that nothing can diminish what the Afghans accomplished for
America and the world with their defeat of the Red Army: "I truly believe
that this caused the Berlin Wall to come down a good five, maybe ten, years
before it would have otherwise. Over a million Russian Jews got their freedom
and left for Israel; God knows how many were freed from the gulags. At least a
hundred million Eastern Europeans are breathing free today, to say nothing of
the Russian people. It's the truth, and all those people who are enjoying those
freedoms have no idea of the part played by a million Afghan ghosts. To this
day no one has ever thanked them.
"They removed the threat we all went to
sleep with every night, of World War III breaking out. The countries that used
to be in the Warsaw Pact are now in NATO. These were truly changes of biblical
proportion, and the effect the jihad had in accelerating these events is
nothing short of miraculous.
"These things happened. They were glorious
and they changed the world. And the people who deserved the credit are the ones
who made the sacrifice. And then we fucked up the endgame."
The story of Charlie Wilson and the CIA's secret
war in Afghanistan is an important, missing chapter of our recent past.
Ironically, neither the United States government nor the forces of Islam will
want this history to be known. But the full story of America's central role in
the Afghan jihad needs to be told and understood for any number of reasons.
Clearly it's not helpful for the world of militant Islam to believe that its
power is so great that nothing can stop it. But the danger exists for us as
well. It may not be welcomed by a government that prefers to see the rising
tide of Islamic militancy as having no connection to our policies or our
actions. But the terrible truth is that the group of sleeping lions that the
United States roused may well have inspired an entire generation of militant
young Muslims to believe that the moment is theirs.
This
extract was taken from My Enemy's Enemy: The Story of the Largest Covert
Operation in History -- the Arming of the Mujahideen by the CIA by George
Crile, published by Atlantic Books Ltd in the UK (£17.99) and in the US by
Grove Atlantic Inc under the title Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary
Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History Atlantic Monthly Press
($26)
Copyright © 2003 Atlantic Books Ltd
Excerpt from
Afghanistan
A Military History from Alexander the Great
to the Fall of the Taliban
by Stephen Tanner, Da Capo Press, 2003
The Rise of the Taliban
The mujahideen were predominantly Muslim
fundamentalists, part of a loose movement that had become increasingly
dangerous since the fall of the Shah of Iran. Islamic terrorism, vividly
demonstrated with the destruction of a Pan Am jetliner over Lockerbie, Scotland
in 1988, had spread to Europe, Africa, and Asia, and threatened to reach the
United States. Most Islamic terrorists were from the Mideast, where the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict fueled the fire, but the CIA was aware that many
of the most vicious terrorists had acquired the nickname "Afghans."
These were Arabs who had joined the jihad in Afghanistan, emerging afterward
with training, weapons, and combat experience. Most Arab volunteers had been
affiliated with the parties of Sayaf and Hekmatyar, though one young Saudi
aristocrat, Osama Bin Laden, had set up his own organization.
Bin Laden first visited Afghanistan as a
twenty-three-year-old in 1980, at the behest of Prince Turki Bin Faisal, head
of Saudi intelligence. By 1982 he had established a base in Pakistan from which
to provide infrastructure for the mujahideen, drawing on the expertise of his
family's billion-dollar construction business. With funds from the Saudi
government, his family and other wealthy contributors, he carved out caves and
tunnel complexes in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, mainly around the
city of Khost and south of Jalalabad. He also claimed to have fought in the
jihad, participating in several ambushes. In 1990, disillusioned with
squabbling among the mujahideen, Bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia to work in
the family business. He also created an organization to aid and support the
35,000 Arab veterans of the Afghan war, who were now among the most dedicated
and experienced fighters in the world. This group came to be known as Al Qaeda
(the Base) and instead of simply providing veterans' benefits would undertake new
operations when the jihad went global.
In the CIA, there was already worry that the
United States had created a monster. The Bush administration began to favor a
peaceful solution to the continuing war in Afghanistan rather than continued
support of the mujahideen. Secretary of State James Baker met with Soviet
foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze to discuss leaving the Communist
Najibullah in power pending internationally supervised elections for a new
Afghan coalition government.
By 1989, the original architects of Pakistan's
covert war strategy, President Zia and ISI chief Akhtar, had been assassinated.
Yousaf, who had been head of the ISI branch that directed mujahideen field
operations, plus weapons supply and training, had retired after being passed
over for promotion. Under the new head of ISI, Hamid Gul, the CIA finally won
its long struggle to control the arms flow to particular commanders in the
field -- a prerogative that Zia and Akhtar, both devout Muslims, had jealously
guarded. Despite the CIA's new control over its shipments, however, elements
within ISI could still support favorites with its own resources, as could Saudi
Arabia, which had poured nearly as much money into the war as the Americans.
In March 1990, Najibullah survived a coup attempt
by a Khalq general in the DRA, Shah Nawaz Tanai. After being foiled, Tanai flew
to Pakistan where he joined forces with Hekmatyar. Diplomat scholar Martin
Ewans has suggested that at the root of this otherwise bizarre alliance between
a Communist and an Islamic radical was a base loyalty to the Ghilzai Pashtuns.
Throughout the year, mujahideen launched attacks on DRA-held Khost, Herat, and
Kandahar, while government convoys took great risks in traversing the roads in
between. The resistance had once more reverted to guerrilla tactics, at which
it was unsurpassed, the only exception coming late in the year when Hekmatyar
launched a frontal assault on Kabul. He was beaten off with heavy casualties.
The DRA army had grown to about sixty thousand
men and held firmly to the large cities. KhAD security forces and Sarandoy
paramilitary police added to the government's strength, as did local militias.
During this period one militia leader, Abdul Rashid Dostum, carved a fiefdom
for himself in northern Afghanistan with fellow Uzbeks. Suspicions were
prevalent among the mujahideen that Soviet troops were still around, flying
aircraft or operating Scuds.
The most significant event of 1990 was Iraq's
invasion of Kuwait, which triggered a massive American-led response. Through
the fall, President George Bush engineered the most impressive military
coalition in history, uniting Saudis to Russians to Japanese to Brazilians,
among dozens of others. After several months of bombing, a 300,000-man force,
predominantly American, crushed the Iraqi army holding Kuwait in a 100-hour
campaign. Hekmatyar and other fundamentalists among the mujahideen rooted for
Saddam Hussein.
In March of that year, while Americans were
trying to put out the oil fires left behind by the Iraqis in Kuwait, the
mujahideen took the eastern Afghan city of Khost, which had held out for a
decade in the midst of resistance bases. They then converged on Gardez, while
Najibullah in Kabul switched the name of his People's Democratic Party to the
"Homeland Party," in a desperate attempt to ditch his government's
Communist affiliation. Indeed, the international handwriting on the wall was
spelling his doom. He had already seen the Soviet Union support the U.S. in the
Gulf War. In May, the United Nations devised a peace plan to which the Afghan
government, Iran, Pakistan, the U.S., and Soviets all agreed. But it was
rejected by the fundamentalist parties of the mujahideen.
In August, Gorbachev barely survived a military
coup staged in Moscow, and then the Americans and Soviets jointly agreed to
stop committing funds to the Afghan conflict at the end of the year. But
Gorbachev would not get that far. In October 1991, the Berlin Wall came down,
and on Christmas Day he resigned his post as general secretary of the Communist
Party. His resignation signaled the end of the Soviet Union, its constituent
republics becoming independent nations free to adopt whatever governmental
system they chose. The Democratic Republic of Afghanistan was now on its own.
In February, the powerful Uzbek warlord, Dostum,
turned against the Afghan government, which had previously supplied him arms.
His forces, together with Massoud's, then took the city of Mazar-i-Sharif. DRA
authority in Herat and Kandahar began to integrate and mujahideen were now
closing in on Kabul from all sides. International parties did their best to
smooth the inevitable transition, the Russians advising Najibullah to step
down. The United Nations also played a leading role, Secretary General Boutros
Boutros Ghali submitting a plan for neutral Afghan leaders to form a
transitionary council to oversee the fall of the DRA and introduce the
mujahideen in a bloodless transfer of power.
Najibullah upset the plan by disappearing on
April 15, justifiably fearing for his life. The general in command of the KhAD
security force committed suicide. By then, Massoud and Dostum, from the north,
and Hekmatyar, from the south, had converged on Kabul, both groups vastly
reinforced by well- equipped DRA army units who no longer had a government.
They paused on the outskirts of the capital while the mjuahideen parties,
pressured by the United Nations, debated the method of transition and the
government's new composition. The mujahideen leaders formed a committee called
the Islamic Jihad Council. But they were too late to stop the battle for the
capital.
Hekmatyar's men were already slipping through the
streets of Kabul, heading for key installations. Massoud launched his own
troops. Though Hekmatyar had the advantage of numbers, Massoud, almost alone
among mujahideen commanders, had established a highly trained force with
excellent command coordination. Dostum's men joined in, and by April 28
Hekmatyar's forces had been evicted from the city, falling back to the south.
The Islamic Jihad Council subsequently arrived, naming Mujadidi, head of one of
the moderate parties, president; Massoud, defense minister; Gailani (also a
moderate), foreign minister; and Sayyaf, he of the close Saudi ties, minister
of the interior. The post of prime minister was offered to Hekmatyar, but he
refused to accept it while Massoud presided over the ministry of defense. This
parceling of responsibility appears well thought out in retrospect, and it
cannot be said that the mujahideen lacked the objective wisdom to theorize a
stable government. The actual situation. however, has been described by
historian Ahmed Rashid, who wrote:
Much
of Afghanistan's subsequent civil war was to be determined by the fact that
Kabul fell, not to the well-armed and bickering Pashtun parties ... but to the
the better organized and more united Tajik forces ... and to the Uzbek forces
from the north. ... It was a devastating psychological blow because for the
first time in 300 years the Pashtuns had lost control of the capital. An internal
civil war began almost immediately.
The following years of turmoil in Afghanistan
seemed to verify the Soviet Union's point of view that the mujahideen, upon
gaining power, would prove disastrous for the country, and that instead of
leading it into the modern age, would drag it backward into the medieval period
from which by the late twentieth century it had only barely emerged.
Mujadidi soon got power-hungry and was displaced
in the summer by Rabbani, the Tajik head of the Islamic Society, which counted
Massoud and Ismail Khan, the mujahideen champion of the Herat area, among its
members. This signified complete northern control of the capital -- between
Rabbani, Massoud, and Dostum -- prompting Hekmatyar to unleash vicious
bombardments of the capital from his positions in the south. One of his rocket
barrages in August killed up to eighteen hundred people.
During this new kaleidoscope of inter-Afghan
rivalry, now at a greater scale than ever due to the immense wealth of captured
DRA material, the focus of fighting shifted. Under the Soviet occupation,
enormous efforts had been made to secure the cities, providing safe havens
where people could work or live under a semblance of normalcy. The real war had
taken place in the countryside, where the Soviets had tried to obliterate the
rebels' support environment. During the "mujahideen civil war,"
however, the cities became the battlefields as rival groups from the
countryside vied for control.
Kabul, though subject to sabotage and rocket
attacks for years, much on the level of Saigon circa 1972, had more or less
stayed intact under the Soviets. Now it was destroyed, block by block, as the
former resistance parties fought each other. Ewans summed up the consequences
by stating: "Over the year following the mujahideen takeover, it was
estimated that some 30,000 Kabulis had been killed and possibly 100,000
wounded, while many more had left the city for internal or external
exile." The refugee flow that once headed for Kabul now headed out of it.
The "rubblization" once achieved by the Soviets in the Afghan
countryside was now duplicated in Afghanistan's cities.
In 1993, the fighting around Kabul continued,
while most of the the country reverted to the same state of affairs encountered
by Ahmad Shah in 1757. The Pashtuns held sway at Kandahar while the Tajik
commander Ismail Khan established order at Herat with Iranian help. The
Iranians appreciated his efforts at repatriating the 1,500,000 refugees who had
arrived on their territory during the Soviet war. Dostum created an independent
administration at Mazar-iSharif. Though he and Massoud fought over control of
Kunduz in the north. On the roads in between, independent warlords preyed on
traffic for loot or tolls, fighting rival groups for control of territory or poppy
fields.
The combination of governmental and economic
collapse, along with an armed populace trained in logistics allowed Afghanistan
to become the center of the world's opium trade. The holy warriors became drug
peddlers -- an irony they excused by the fact that the endusers of the product
were infidels. Filtered through labs in Pakistan and the former Soviet
republics, Afghan opium was converted to heroin, eventually providing over 70
percent of the world's supply. While enriching some of the mujahideen parties,
or at least replacing the drop in foreign aid, opium farming also became the
only means for many rural communities to survive.
While the Sunni mujahideen fought each other, not
to be forgotten were the Shi'ite Hazaras, who from their domain in the center
of the Hindu Kush had broken up during the 1980s into quarreling factions.
Since the Soviets had seldom taken on these descendants of the Mongol horde,
they had been largely left to themselves for vicious fighting, while completely
ignored by the Peshawar parties funded and supplied by the ISI, CIA, Chinese,
and Saudis. After the Soviet evacuation, Iran, the Shi'ite patron of the
Hazaras, demanded that they unite into a single organization, as the Sunni
parties had been compelled to do by the United Nations. The Hazaras complied by
forming the "Party of Unity," an umbrella group that marked their
emergence into the civil war as a formidable body of fighters. They promptly
joined Hekmatyar in his assaults on Kabul, forcing Massoud to stretch his
forces to fight on two fronts.
In early 1994, Dostum and his Uzbeks joined
Hekmatyar, and their joint attacks on the capital, including the shutdown of
the air corridor that had brought food and relief supplies, forced a new exodus
of civilians. Massoud counterpunched by retaking Kunduz in the north, and also
launched an offensive that knocked back the Uzbek-Pashtun alliance from the
vicinity of Kabul. Dostum retreated back to the north while the Hazaras again
emerged from the Hindu Kush to join Hekmatyar's forces for renewed attacks from
the west. By the end of 1994, Massoud was still holding on to a corridor of
government power from Kabul through the Panjshir Valley to Kunduz, with nominal
control of much of the DRA's former base network. But late that summer he
received word of still another armed group that had emerged around Kandahar.
This party was not mujahideen but an entirely new group that called itself the
"Taliban." The word meant "students," or considering its
religious connotation, "seekers." Somehow it had already conquered
the tribal warlords of the south and was now headed north, toward Herat,
Ghazni, and the capital.
The Taliban began amid the anarchy of southern
Afghanistan when a local strongman raped several girls in the summer of 1994.
Local people turned for help to a mullah named Mohammed Omar and he in turn
called on some of his religious students. These men executed the criminal and
intimidated his followers. Afterward the students responded to calls from other
people victimized by lawless brigands. The ranks of the Taliban grew in direct
proportion to the society's desperate desire for order.
In the growth of the Taliban one can also see the
gloved hand of Pakistan. Under Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, the Pakistanis
had decided to open the road to Central Asia through Kandahar and Herat. Bhutto
had held direct discussions with Ismail Khan and Dostum about security
(bypassing the beleaguered Rabbani government in Kabul). In October the
Pakistanis decided to test-drive the route with a thirty-truck convoy filled
with food and medicine. The convoy, however, was captured by an Afghan warlord
named Mansur.
Just prior to this event, a group of Taliban had
seized a huge arms depot at Spinbaldak, capturing eighteen thousand AK-47s and
tons of ammunition previously stockpiled for Hekmatyar. Now the Pakistanis
asked the Taliban to rescue their convoy, which they did with elan. Mansur was
shot and his body was paraded around hanging from the barrel of a tank. The
Taliban then turned against Kandahar itself, taking the city after two days of
minor fighting. The government garrison surrendered amid rumors that its
commander had been bribed. Captured were vast quantities of arms, including
tanks, armored personnel carriers and artillery. On the airfield the Taliban
found a dozen Mig-21 jets and transport helicopters.
Over the next three months the Taliban overran
twelve southern provinces as its ranks swelled with thousands of volunteers,
primarily Afghan refugees or native Pashtuns filtered through Pakistani
religious schools. In areas under their control, the Taliban replaced utter
anarchy with strict order under extremely conservative Islamic principles And
the Pakistanis now had their open road. In the United States, to the degree
that the public was still observing Afghanistan, the emergence of the Taliban
seemed fortunate. Americans have always retained a large puritanical streak of
their own, and the sight of this mysterious new army, rifles in one hand and
Korans in the other, rolling over the countryside leaving order in place of
chaos, was not unpleasing. Ahmed Rashid was able to observe them up close from
the beginning:
These
boys were a world apart from the Mujaheddin whom I had got to know during the
1980s -- men who could recount their tribal and clan lineages, remembered their
abandoned farms and valleys with nostalgia and recounted legends and stories
from Afghan history. ... They were literally the orphans of the war, the
rootless and the restless, the jobless and the economically deprived with
little self-knowledge. They admired war because it was the only occupation they
could possibly adapt to. Their simple belief in a messianic, puritan Islam
which had been drummed into them by simple village mullahs was the only prop
they could hold on to and which gave their lives some meaning.
While the Afghan civil war raged, the United
States had its own problems in the early 1990s. In Somalia, President Bush had
tried to duplicate the success of his coalition in Iraq by mobilizing an
international force to feed a starving population that numbered in the
millions. Pakistani troops, among others, joined the effort. But the contingent
of U.S. special forces suffered eighteen dead in an ill-advised raid to catch a
local warlord's aides in the center of Mogadishu. In the following election,
Bush was defeated and his successor, Bill Clinton, promptly pulled all U.S.
forces out of Somalia.
That same year, a huge car bomb exploded at the
World Trade Center in Manhattan. The blast killed six people and injured a
thousand more, mostly from smoke inhalation. The attack shook the country
because the World Trade towers had become symbols of not only the power of New
York City's financial district, but through their soaring majesty of America
and even the Western World.
Fortunately, the north tower easily withstood the
bomb, set off in its parking garage, and the FBI eventually tracked down the
culprits. It was an Islamic group based in New Jersey led by a blind mullah.
The group was so inept that one of its members had even tried to retrieve his
deposit from the rent-a-car agency that provided the blown-up vehicle. The
subsequent prosecution of the Jersey Islamics fell beneath the radar screen of
a public more interested in the 0. J. Simpson trial, the Oklahoma City bombing,
and the Monica Lewinsky affair, all of which took place across a decade of
increasing prosperity. Investigators, however, were disturbed to discover that
the plotters had Afghan connections and had put on the drawing board a broader
plan: to crash a hijacked plane into CIA headquarters.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban churned its way
north. In January 1995, Hekmatyar tried to hold them off before Ghazni, but the
city fell after fierce fighting on the outskirts. The Taliban then swept
through the eastern mountains, groups of mujahideen collapsing before their
onslaught, sometimes without a shot being fired as men laid down their arms or
joined the new movement. After cutting off Hekmatyar's supply route to
Jalalabad, the Taliban zeroed in on his fortress base at Charasyab, south of
Kabul. After a last-ditch attempt to rally his forces against the idealistic
students, Hekmatyar was forced to flee. The once-feared mujahideen leader had
been chased from the country, his forces dispersed or now part of the Taliban.
Massoud took the opportunity of his rival's
demise to attack the Hazaras, who had been coordinating with Hekmatyar against
Kabul from the west. The Hazaras called upon the Taliban for help, but the two
groups fell out and the Taliban captured and executed the Hazara leader,
according to some reports by pushing him out of a helicopter. Now it was the
Taliban against Massoud. The Taliban closed in on Kabul from three sides,
pouring rocket and shell fire into the city. On March 19, Massoud counterattacked,
providing the students their first taste of defeat as he knocked their main
force back toward Ghazni, clearing the remainder well out of artillery range.
The main Taliban effort then switched to the
west. Advancing across the dusty flatlands of western Afghanistan, the long
columns of Taliban pickup trucks interspersed with occasional armored vehicles
were assailed by government fighter jets flying from Shindand airbase. Ismail
Khan, commander of the area, was reinforced by a thousand crack mujahideen
airlifted by Massoud from Kabul. The Taliban had as many as twenty thousand
fighters against twelve thousand government troops. Just south of Shindand the
two sides collided in a ferocious battle, where again the Taliban's
inexperience was revealed. They were held and in May, Ismail Khan
counterattacked, driving them back to Delaram, two hundred miles south of
Herat. This semidesert region became littered with hundreds of wounded young
men crawling to find water, their faith in victory having exceeded the
ambulatory capacity of their army. A key factor in the campaign was that the
Taliban were no longer operating near Pakistan but alongside the border with
Iran. The Iranians, alarmed at the rise of a purist Sunni movement on their
doorstep, kept Ismail supplied with fuel and munitions, and their border troops
skirmished with the Taliban in Nimruz province.
After their retreat, the Taliban sent out a call
to the Islamic schools of Pakistan -- in many cases the only social structure
provided to Afghan refugees -- and thousands more devout young men rallied to
their cause. Pakistan's ISI discreetly shepherded this flow, making sure all
the new recruits were properly armed and somewhat trained. In August, Ismail
Khan launched another attack, driving the Taliban all the way back to the
Helmand River. But then the Taliban counterattacked with new strength, catching
Ismail Khan by surprise. The government troops fled, paralleled by
machine-gun-mounted, troop-laden pickup trucks racing on parallel routes across
the landscape to set up ambush positions in their rear. Shindand airbase fell
in a rush as the Taliban inherited fifty-two Mig-21s, an assortment of
helicopters, and sixty artillery pieces. Herat was now only a short jump away,
and the ancient Timurid capital, once a veritable showpiece of Persian culture,
fell without much resistance in early September 1995. The population had heard
of the Taliban's success in establishing social order around Kandahar and many
were inclined to welcome similar rule. Ismail Khan fled to Iran.
The next month the Taliban were back at Kabul.
Massoud had spent the summer vying with Dostum in the north, but now realized
that the true threat had reappeared from the south. Tension among Kabul's
people also increased following the disaster at Herat. After the government
accused Pakistan of supporting the Taliban phenomenon, the Pakistani embassy
was sacked by a mob and one man was killed while the ambassador and others were
beaten. This did little to diminish ISI's efforts on the Taliban's behalf.
Massoud launched counterattacks but was unable to keep the Taliban at bay.
Instead, a constant stream of rockets, artillery fire, and air strikes came in
against the capital.
The battle stalemated through the winter and
spring of 1996 as thousands of civilians died. In midwinter, the United Nations
mounted an emergency airlift of food into the capital. In June, Hekmatyar
reemerged, taking the post of prime minister that he had once declined. His
arrival in Kabul was greeted with a 220-rocket barrage from the Taliban. By
this time, Massoud (in his role as general for the Rabbani government), Dostum,
and Hekmatyar had put aside their differences. After difficult fighting in the
Hazarajat in which the Taliban got the upper hand, Karim Khalili, the new
leader of the Shi'ite Party of Unity, also joined the government's coalition.
In late August, Mullah Omar launched the Taliban
in an offensive east of the capital. Outposts fell like dominos before their
onslaught, and by early September they had fought their way through the
mountains and passes to take Jalalabad. The Taliban then aimed northwest, for
Bagram, north of the capital. In the end, Massoud was pried rather than beaten
out of Kabul. By taking Jalalabad the Taliban had cut the transit route to
Pakistan. If they reached Bagram they would have cut the routes north,
controlling the mouth of the Panjshir Valley and the Salang highway. Kabul
would be isolated before winter set in, fast running out of not just food and
fuel (firewood) but munitions. Meanwhile, Massoud looked at a city sprinkled
with Hekmatyar's fundamentalist Pashtuns, the remnants of other parties, and
the sullen vestiges of KhAD and the Communist militias. On the night of
September 26, 1996, Massoud evacuated Kabul. With as much arms as his loyal
Tajiks could bring out, the Lion of Panjshir returned to his valley.
The next day the Taliban made an uncontested
entrance into the capital. Having little respect for international restraints,
they broke into the United Nations compound where the former Communist leader,
Najibullah, had been hiding. After killing him and his brother, they strung up
his castrated body for public display.
In the fall of 1996 the Taliban surged north of
Kabul, but Massoud, with the support of Dostum's Uzbek forces, knocked them
back on their heels. When Taliban forces reached the Salang highway, Massoud
sprung a devastating ambush, killing 150. Dostum blocked the tunnel and held
off further Taliban attacks at Salang while Massoud launched a counteroffensive
through Charikar and Bagram, at one point returning to just a few miles from
the capital.
After winter forced a lull in operations, the
Taliban launched a new offensive in 1997, retaking Bagram and, more
dangerously, thrusting a left-hook into the north from Herat. Dostum turned to
fight them off to the west of Mazar-i-Sharif, but one of his commanders, Abdul
Malik, suddenly switched sides, allowing the Taliban to take the city in May.
The Taliban now found itself holding a modern city, by Afghan standards, with
Uzbeks, Tajiks, Turkmen, and Hazaras on all sides. The Pashtun radicals, with
their usual certitude, began implementing Taliban law, and also made the
mistake of trying to disarm the Hazaras. New fighting erupted and Malik
switched sides again in the Taliban's rear. It was a disaster for the Taliban
as up to three thousand of their vanguard were trapped and killed. Later they
were able to point out mass graves where their men had been piled, many
apparently shot after having surrendered.
Massoud called a meeting of those forces still
resisting the Taliban. from which emerged the United Front for the Liberation
of Afghanistan -- or as it was more commonly known, the Northern Alliance. With
Massoud as military commander, it basically consisted of all major Afghan
ethnic groups other than the Pashtun. By this time, the Taliban's governmental
philosophy had become well known. Women were rendered anonymous, refused work
or education. Justice was implemented by chopping off people's hands, ears, or heads,
depending on the crime. Public stoning was the solution to adultery.
Television, music, photographs, whistling, and kite flying were all banned.
Women would be beaten if they showed an arm or wore white socks, while the
windows in their houses were expected to be blackened. The Taliban had indeed
established order in most of the country, but it was of a fearsome medieval
kind. The enforcement activities of their Department for the Propagation of
Virtue and Suppression of Vice caused most distress in Aghanistan's cities. The
primarily rural Pashtun were not overly affected, and prior to the Soviet
invasion their women could claim only a 10 percent literacy rate in any case,
compared to just under half of all men.
In July 1998, the Taliban launched major new
offensives against the north, taking Taliqan from Massoud in the east and
Mazar-i-Sharif from Dostum. In the latter city they revenged their earlier
disaster by slaughtering every Hazara they could get their hands on, up to six
thousand. They also killed nine Iranian diplomats in a consulate, prompting
Iran to mass seventy thousand troops on the Afghan border. Late in the year,
Massoud retook Taliqan, whose airfield was important for arms he was now
receiving from Tajikistan and Russia, but he had to relinquish it again when
another Taliban thrust came in from Kunduz.
Through 1999, towns in the north continued to
change hands, while the largest battle took place when Massoud crushed a
Taliban offensive north of Bagram, inflicting one thousand casualties. In the
Hazarajat, fighting went back and forth for two years until the Taliban secured
Bamian. The outside world was finally jolted into paying attention to the
conflict in spring 2001 when the Taliban dynamited the two huge statues of
Buddha that had been carved into the Bamian cliffs during the third and fifth
centuries A.D. The rise of the Taliban had initially been viewed with some
hopefulness by casual observers in the West; but their spectacular destruction
of the Buddhas furnished proof of their disturbing nature.
After retaking Taliqan one last time, the Taliban
now controlled 90 percent of the country. The Northern Alliance was pinned into
a corner by the border of Tajikistan, its only remaining ground of importance
being Massoud's native Panjshir Valley that pointed toward Kabul. Massoud still
defiantly refused to allow the Taliban to claim control of all Afghanistan.
Mullah Omar, who ruled from a house near Kandahar, had been denied recognition
by the international community, and never would be considered the legitimate
ruler as long as the Northern Alliance stayed in the field. With the force left
at his disposal, Massoud was incapable of rolling back the Taliban by himself.
His best hope was that the world at large would realize the abomination the
Taliban presented and eventually come to his aid. This would indeed happen;
however, Massoud himself would fall just short of witnessing the event.
Osama Bin Laden, having left Afghanistan in 1990,
had moved to Khartoum, Sudan in 1992 after arguing vehemently with the Saudi
royal family about the aftermath of the Gulf War. He had opposed the entire
idea of solving the Kuwait issue with American forces, and was appalled when
the United States, after its victory, set up permanent bases on Saudi territory.
In the Sudan -- at the time a hotbed of Islamic fervor, mainly directed against
black minorities in the south -- Bin Laden devoted himself to building his Al
Qaeda organization, its hard core consisting of Islamic fighters forged through
the Soviet war in Afghanistan. With members from forty-three nations, Al Qaeda
was dedicated to global jihad on behalf of a puritan strain of Islam, while in
its methods it somewhat resembled the medieval sect of Assassins that had been
wiped out by the Mongols in 1251.
The CIA tried to follow Bin Laden closely, noting
the opposition the U.S. had encountered in Somalia, plus the World Trade Center
car bomb and othera well-funded terrorist operations. In 1995, five U.S.
soldiers were blown up in Saudi Arabia, and a few months later nineteen more
were killed by a truck filled with explosives at a barracks in Dhahran. In
1994, the Saudis, fearing they had a wild card on their hands, had revoked Bin
Laden's citizenship. After the Dhahran attack, the Sudanese, too, asked him to
leave their country. These official moves under U.S. pressure may have had
little influence on the true support Bin Laden retained in the Mideast. Still,
he needed a secure geographic location from which to direct and build his
organization. In May 1996 he returned to Afghanistan and the cave complexes he
had previously created within its thousands of mountain folds. Always one of
the most forbidding territories in the world, under Taliban rule Afghanistan
had also become the most xenophobic, obsessed with pure Islam without concern
for what the rest of the world thought.
In August 1998, two American embassies were blown
up almost simultaneously, in the capitals of Kenya and Tanzania. Twelve
Americans were killed along with 212 Africans, over 2,000 more people wounded.
The CIA identified the hand of Al Qaeda behind the attacks, and two weeks later
seventy-two cruise missiles came soaring in against Bin Laden's bases around
Khost and Jalalabad. Other missiles destroyed a factory in Khartoum that the
Sudanese said produced pharmaceuticals. In October 2000, the destroyer U.S.S.
Cole, while refueling in Aden harbor, Yemen, was devastated by a suicide bomb
that left a gaping hole in the vessel's side, along with seventeen dead and
thirty-nine wounded U.S. sailors. Both Yemeni suicide bombers were found to be
veterans of Afghanistan. With an election near, the U.S. failed to respond with
force but vowed to intensify its intelligence efforts against Bin Laden. By
2001, Clinton had finished his terms in office, and the presidency passed to
President Bush's son, George W. Bush, who had squeaked past Clinton's Vice
President, Albert Gore, in a disputed election. Bush's primary programs were
tax relief, education, and the erection of a hi-tech missile shield for American
defense.
Through 2000-01, as the Taliban consolidated its
rule of Afghanistan, save for the slice of northern territory held by the
tenacious Massoud, Osama Bin Laden and Mullah Omar began to work closely
together. Otherwise ostracized by the world community, the Taliban leader found
through Bin Laden a well-funded international network of fighters and scholars
dedicated to jihad. Benefiting from the Taliban example in turn, Bin Laden used
religious schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan as recruiting stations from which
the most serious pupils could be drawn for military training or terrorist
missions. The continuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, along with Pakistan's
battle with India for Kashmir, produced a steady stream of young men anxious to
take part on the front lines for Islam. Bin Laden himself seems to have had a
larger, more fanatic worldview; however, the ongoing bloodshed in Palestine and
Kashmir motivated the bulk of his recruits.
The military situation in Afghanistan remained a
stalemate, the Northern Alliance forces having nowhere else to retreat, while
Taliban troops were unable to crack Massoud's small remaining territory. But
then Osama Bin Laden proved his worth to his Taliban hosts. In late summer,
Massoud granted an interview to two Algerian journalists carrying credentials
from Belgium. He had put them off for some time, but finally agreed to a
meeting. During the interview a bomb hidden within the camera exploded, mortally wounding
Massoud. The Algerians had been members of Al Qaeda.
Massoud clung stubbornly to life but eventually
died on a helicopter while being flown to a hospital in Tajikistan. During the
twenty-four hours following the blast, the Taliban leadership exulted over the
demise of their most formidable opponent. They did not realize that another
secret Al Qaeda operation was about to begin. The next day would prove even
more fateful for the Taliban, due to an attack taking place on the other side
of the world. It was a Tuesday in the United States, September 11, 2001.
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